Metaphone Calculator

Search for your ancestors using this interactive directory of the best free genealogy search engines. Use the date & calendar calculators to enhance your family history as you work on your family tree.

Genealogy Calculators:

Metaphone Calculator

A metaphone code is similar to a soundex code. Metaphone creates the same code for similar sounding (phonetic) names that can be used for searching similarly sounding names. It's more accurate than soundex because it uses the basic rules of English pronunciation.

A metaphone search is a way of searching for a surname the way it is pronounced, rather than the way it is spelled. If a database offers a metaphone search, like many of the RootsWeb searches, they are a way of expanding your search to include possible transcription errors or surname spelling variations.

Enter a surname to calculate the metaphone code:

Enter Surname:

Metaphone Code:

Compare the Metaphone Code for Two Surnames

Use this utility to compare two surnames to see if they have same Metaphone code.

Metaphone Calculator for Genealogy Search

Change the pull-down box that says "exact" to "metaphone" for a metaphone search.

How the Metaphone Search Works

The metaphone search converts your name to a code, and then searches the database for all occurrences of surnames that share the same code.

A metaphone search is considered more accurate than a soundex search as it is based on English pronunciation. While many search engines have a soundex search, the metaphone search is not as prevalent in genealogy databases.

Metaphone converts a surname to a code of 16 possible consonant sounds and can contain any amount of consonants.

One of the limitations of soundex is that similar sounding surnames that start with a different first letter, such as Carr and Karr, will always have different soundex codes, and therefore a soundex search will not find these sound-alike names.

However, with metaphone, they will have the same code and a metaphone search will return both results when searching a database.

Definitely use the Metaphone Search:

If surname sound-alike names might start with
different letters such as K and C.

If surname begins with a silent letter such a
KN, PF, or WR.

If surname has any of the letters C,S,G,J,K,Q,X,Z on both
sides of the letter H or W such as SHC, SHS, CHS, KHZ, SWS, KWS, CWK.
There is some confusion about the way soundex calculates these names.

When you are searching a genealogy database,
check that drop-down box to see if a metaphone search is offered.
You never know who you may be missing in a genealogy database until you try all
the search options.